lemming

I'm afraid that you don't quite see all the complexity involved. I'm not saying I see all of it, but I can see there is more to it than you think.

What about bacteria? Not only don't they don't often use sexual reproduction, so they don't need a pair of parents to produce offsprings, but they exchange plasmids and therefore DNA with little regard for species.

Plants are a complete mess of genome duplication, aneuploidy and whatnot. In these aspects, they are sort of scary to me.

Also, what about formation of a new species? Do you think there is a clean-cut time when they stop producing offspring? Also, what exactly do you mean by fertile? Where do you get a partner to test if the offspring is fertile?

These are just a few problems that came to my mind right away. I'm sure there's loads more. I'm afraid that the notion of well organised, easy to categorise world just doesn't match the real world. Species are more or less a continuum. Incidentally, so is life. We have no good definition fornlife either. Just use whatever definition is useful at the moment and don't forget to specify it when necessary.

Hasn't Beal's list been taken down quite a while ago? I remember making a copy of it before they removed it. It was a great source, but sometimes it needed some context. I think all of Frontiers in ended up on the list for reasons, but their review process was mostly alright, for example. It was this kind of lack of clearly definedrules and explanations that let them to taking the list down. Is it back up?

I'm wondering about coverage. How much was it talked about in the public? How much was it covered by media? What's your experience from France and other countries that reached the threshold and from countries that remained far from it? People can't sign something they never heard about.

There is also undewater hockey. Two water hockeys to offset the lack of fire hockey?

For the record, this is almost certainly a genetic defect of the father, some kind of dominant mutation. Nutrition and other environmental factors most likely didn't play any role in a height difference this big.

There are two copies of each gene. Here, one of the copies got mutated in such a way that it caused the stunted growth of the father. Each sperm contains one randomly selected copy of each gene. Therefore half of the father's sperms contained the mutated gene and the other half the normal version. There was 50% chance the son would be normal height and 50% chance he would be small like his father.

I actually know a family like this. Nothing fishy going on there, the mutation is well described and now new kids with the mutation get growth hormones during their growth to reach normal size.

Nice sheets! Nice cat too, of course.

Well, the lateral launch was truly spectacular :-)

I read about such experiments some time ago. If I remember correctly, after being forced awake for some time, some people stopped being tired and had to be forced to sleep. I also believe there are individual differences, so while some people in the discussion describe their own interesting experience, keep in mind that others might react differently.

In a large part, a distraction. Or more generally, a way to stay in power. How do you stay in power when your country is doing very poorly economically while you and your friends keep siphoning public money into their pockets? You create a strong narrative, ideally an external enemy ("NATO wants to destroy our way of life!" "Ukraine is full of fascists killing Russians!"). Support it by propaganda from your state-controlled media and you are a hero saving the country, if not the world. You can do pretty much anything and still retain considerable support.

That's also why Putin can't really afford peace, he would lose a strong narrative in his favour. He pretends to agree, but doesn't actually follow conditions of any agreement while constantly increasing his demands. He might agree with an agreement that would basically be Ukraine's capitulation, but nothing less.

Thanks! I didn't want to write any spoilers, but somehow I failed to think of including the actual story.

This reminds me very much of a short story The Egg by Andy Weir.

Not any more. It was never an official name. Now it is Arrokoth.